Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

A particularly charming political anthem from Hamas

Here's a political anthem I missed - Hamas, Hamas, Hamas the apple of my eye.

You can listen to it and even watch the video here. But I'll give you the lyrics so you can sing along, particularly to the catchy chorus "in black bags, chunks of flesh of Jews"

    They destroyed the Merkava [tank]

    The apple of my eye - Hamas (repeated eight times)

    A bombing every minute

    Soldiers are afraid

    A bombing every minute

    Soldiers are afraid

    In black bags

    Chunks of flesh of Jews (repeated five times)

    In retaliation for Yassin we want Sharon's head

    We want Sharon's head

    We want Sharon's head!

    Hamas, Hamas, Hamas the apple of my eye - Hamas

    They destroyed the Merkava [tank]

    The apple of my eye - Hamas (repeated five times)

    The apple of my eye -Hamas

    The apple of my eye - Hamas

Catchy, huh?

Oddly this is dedicated to the Arab and Palestinian community in Sweden who I imagine were touched.

For other political anthems go here.

The statistics and strategy behind suicide bombings

I first came across M.Daniele Paserman on a football website. He'd done some interesting work on valuing goal scorers.

Now Chris Dillow draws attention to a rather different Paserman paper - the mathematical relationship between suicide bombing and Israeli targeted killings. Here's the paper's conclusion:

In this paper we assess the effectiveness of suicide attacks and targeted killings in the Second Intifada.

We find evidence that the targeted killings of Palestinian leaders by Israel
reduce realized Palestinian violence. We find, however, that intended Palestinian violence is increasing at low levels of targeted killings, but decreasing at higher levels.

There is little evidence to suggest that suicide bombings against Israelis reduce the number of subsequent Palestinian fatalities. Rather, we find that suicide attacks that kill at least one Israeli lead to subsequent increased incidence and levels of Palestinian fatalities.

Our results do not support the notion that suicide attacks and targeted killings follow the “tit-for-tat” pattern that is commonly postulated in the literature.

Chris draws the conclusion from this that suicide bombing is a bad military strategy. But this is only true if the Palestinian leadership minds how many people die. The deaths may help put pressure on the Israeli government. Increasing the reprisal attacks may, perversely be part of the plan.

Here's an idea

I'd like to propose a boycott by the National Union of Journalists. I know I am not a member, but hopefully just this once they will overlook it.

It is time to boycott those who do not accept the self-determination of the Palestinian people and resist the rights of their elected representatives.

Their use of violence in the occupied territories is unacceptable.

The idea that they are acting in self-defence is simply an excuse. Innocent people are being killed.

I hope you will join me in a boycott of Fatah.

How best to respond to the Israel boycott

The fine piece by Anthony Julius and Alan Dershowitz on the Israel boycott in this morning's paper is even finer online.

We've produced a 3,500 word version of their oped which includes an excellent description of the circumstances in which an academic boycott could be justified.

But at the end of 3,500 words one is left with this question - how should one respond?

The boycott motions are the work of a handful of left activists. They are totally unrepresentative of their members and even their members aren't all that representative of their profession (at least in the NUJ's case). The motions won't actually do anything. So wouldn't the best thing be to ignore them?

No.

Tempting though it is just to yawn and turn the other way, the motions have to be fought. The boycotts are an attempt to anchor Israel in the minds of the public as similar to South Africa and an illegitimate state. Once this impression is allowed to take hold, the only argument one can have is how bad Israel is compared to South Africa, and the best one can hope for is to move it a little down the scale.

In other words the debate is lost before it begins.

The other day I interviewed the Leader of the Opposition David Cameron at a Conservative Friends of Israel lunch. "Are you a Zionist?" I asked him. It is a symbol of just how far we have come in this debate that his affirmative answer was considered brave and risky.

In Israel, some are considering retaliation. A boycott of a British touring party starring in the ABBA musical Mama Mia, for instance. Or putting a label on British goods reading "These goods come from a boycotting country".

This would be very foolish.

To treat every British person as if they were responsible for the boycott is deeply wrong. And dangerous. if you lump every British person together a solidarity with the boycotters might be created.

No, the only way forward is through careful argument and efficient organisation. A long slog, but the only alternative.

Charles Moore attacks the Israel university boycotters

Saturday's Telegraph contained another gem from Charles Moore. His passionate, lucid attack on the Israel boycotters is essential reading.

It includes this:

The main universities of Israel are, in fact, everything that we in the West would recognise as proper universities. They have intellectual freedom. They do not require an ethnic or religious qualification for entry. They are not controlled by the government. They have world-class standards of research, often producing discoveries which benefit all humanity. In all this, they are virtually unique in the Middle East.

The silly dons are not alone. The National Union of Journalists, of which I am proud never to have been a member, has recently passed a comparable motion, brilliantly singling out the only country in the region with a free press for pariah treatment. Unison, which is a big, serious union, is being pressed to support a boycott of Israeli goods, products of the only country in the region with a free trade union movement.

And concludes thus:

As for Israel, many sins can be laid to its charge. But it is morally serious in a way that we are not, because it has to be. Forty years after its greatest victory, it has to work out each morning how it can survive.

Read it all, though.

The Israel-Palestine conflict - Who cares? We shouldn't

I'm sure that like me you've got strong views on the rights and wrongs of the "Soccer War" of 1969. Honduras's treatment of El Salvador and its noble people is an enduring international shame; the Peace Treaty of 1980 was a sham which robbed the victimised Salvadoreans of their land. I am still very diligent in boycotting Honduran produce; I will never, despite numerous invitations, attend a lecture given by a Honduran academic; naturally, I have disinvested my large stake in the Honduran economy. My belief in the righteousness of El Salvador's cause knows no bounds.

You would think me mad, a stranger to that region, if I held such strong views about a tiny sliver of land in Central America. But it's no madder than Brits who get overexcited about a tiny sliver of land in the Middle East and join the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, organise boycotts of Israeli universities and demand that British companies not do business in Israel. I've never understood why the Israel-Palestine conflict gets so much coverage (many more people die in African border wars but they only make the news-in-brief columns) or why Western statesmen think that they should get involved in pointless summiteering there.

Do we have any strategic interests there? Not really. Maybe it's the frontline in a clash of civilisations, and we need to bolster Israel against the forces of Islamofascism? Well, given that Osama bin Laden seems to be as upset that Spain pushed out the Moors as any perceived injustice against the Palestinians, I'm not sure that a peace deal between Israel and Palestine will stop al-Qaeda lunatics trying to blow us up. Sure, if I had to choose, I would rather be an Arab living in Israel than in any of the neighbouring Arab kleptocracies and failed states, but still I don't feel like I have a dog in that fight.

So am I mistaken? Am I missing something fundamental? Edward Luttwak in a brilliant article for Prospect reassures me that the Middle East is really quite irrelevant (unless you happen to be a Middle Easterner):

Humanitarians should note that the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000 — about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur. Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the Cold War. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the "oil weapon" was wielded...

In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the Middle East and oil prices is far from straightforward. Between 1981 and 1999 — a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged — oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on Middle Eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world's crude oil.

Furthermore:

Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the Middle East from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, nor would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.

He goes on to say this:

That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the Middle East, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts — excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the Middle East is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the Middle East (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all.

His conclusion:

Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia — places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past

The broad thrust of Luttwak's analysis seems sane enough for everyone to ignore it.

Robbie Millen

The real story behind the Alan Johnston kidnapping

The BBC's John Simpson reported this morning on the kidnapping of his colleague Alan Johnston and gave the impression that almost everyone in Gaza deplored the abduction. His desire to emphasise just how much support there is for Mr Johnston was understandable, but also risks obscuring the real story.

Mr Johnston's kidnapping is not merely a criminal act, it is a political move. In order for listeners and viewers to understand it, the full extent of the in-fighting among Palestinian factions must be explained.

Mr Johnston's kidnappers are thought to be the Durmush clan, who also played a key role in the kidnapping of Gilad Schalit, the missing Israeli soldier.

The links between the various groups are complicated:

Until recently, the Durmush clan had been considered an ally of Hamas. However, roughly two and a half weeks ago Hamas militants killed two Fatah members from the family. In response, the members of the Durmush family killed three Hamas militants and abducted four more, and published leaflets accusing the Hamas-led government of being anti-Islamic.

Members of the clan have also fired on Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar's home on a near-daily basis, who as a result no longer sleeps at home.

Johnston's abduction is a violent power play and, as with Schalit, the clan is holding out against Hamas as part of their feud.

This explains why the BBC emphasising that Johnson is a "friend of the Palestinians" isn't cutting as much ice with the kidnappers as one might hope.

I know that the BBC is an impossibly difficult position as both reporter and employer, but the story is the link between Johnston's disappearance and the feud, civil disorder in Gaza since Israel's departure and Schalit. The BBC has a responsibility to report it.

Something is deeply wrong with the BBC's coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict

Stephen Pollard has got his hands on a Jeremy Bowen memo about the coming year in the Middle East.  It is fascinating and depressing.

Here is what the BBC's Middle East Editor has to say about what he calls the fragmentation of Palestinian society:

The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile.

I am genuinely astonished at this. Are the doctrines and behaviour of the groups themselves not part of the explanation. The murderous militancy of Hamas? The corruption of Fatah?

It demonstrates an unbelievable degree of bias to blame Palestinian civil strife entirely on the Israelis.

But beyond the question of balance, what is striking about the memo is how poor the analysis is. There's no hint for instance of anything deeper, such as the analysis of Christopher Caldwell that I linked to yesterday. If this is the best that the Middle East Editor can do, how can correspondents with less specialist knowledge do better?

I think Stephen Pollard has discovered a really important document, which makes a loud and eloquent case that something is dreadfully wrong with the BBC's coverage.

The demographics of the war on terror

Why are Palestinains killing each other? Christopher Caldwell thinks he knows.

In a fascinating column, he argues that traditional explanations may be wrong. Something very simple may be involved - an age bulge.

Caldwell draws attention to the work of German social scientist Gunnar Heinsohn:

In Mr Heinsohn's view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

So when the Palestinain youths could no longer kill Israelis, they needed to find someone else to kill. And they started to kill the first people they could find - each other.

It is important to understand that Caldwell is not passing comment on the rights and wrongs of the Palestinian cause here, merely making an observation about the impact of demographics.

In fact, he goes on to suggest that the hearts and minds approach to fighting Islamicism may be pointless, since ideology has got little to do with it.

I don't quite make that leap, but his column is well worth reading.

Conceding a critical argument

The BBC's Nick Robinson provides an excellent analysis of Tony Blair's foreign policy speech, arguing that it is not a change in policy for the Prime Minister. Robinson says that it is the political situation that has changed, with the Americans now more open to the ideas that the speech contains.

I am struck by a different aspect of the Prime Minister's thesis - his idea that the Israel-Palestinian dispute is the core issue and that we must now bend every effort to reaching a solution. He said this last night:

There is a fundamental misunderstanding that this is about changing policy on Syria and Iran.  First, those two countries do not at all share identical interests. But in any event that is not where we start.

On the contrary, we should start with Israel/Palestine.  That is the core.

Mr Blair has been a good friend of Israel, a courageous friend, but I think he is quite wrong here.

He seems to have accepted the idea that we will only win the war on terror once there is peace in Israel. The truth is that there will only be peace in Israel once we have won the war on terror.

Mr Blair has conceded a critical point. He has accepted the idea that the behaviour of the state of Israel is the underlying grievance that drives on the Islamists and wins them what support they have in the Arab world.

The truth is very different. The existence of so many dictatorships, kleptocracies and violent thugs in the Middle East is what drives on the conflict, in Israel, as elsewhere. The Palestinian crisis and the tragedy of the poor Palestinian people is an effect, an outcome, not a cause.

An approach that begins by seeking peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is understandable. And who wouldn't want it to work? But I fear it won't. Because the Prime Minister’s idea that the Israel-Palestinian problem is the core is simply incorrect.